Utterance Support Apparatus for Balanced Meeting Participation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Meetings often suffer from low productivity due to imbalanced speaker participation, where some speakers dominate while others remain silent, leading to inefficient discussions.
Innovation Solution
An utterance support apparatus that calculates and displays the accumulated utterance periods of each speaker, using visual graphics to encourage balanced participation by rewarding speakers for moderate contributions and gently discouraging over-talkers and under-talkers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If visual feedback is provided to encourage speaker participation, then meeting productivity is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements real-time visual feedback by displaying graphic indicators in each speaker's display region that reflect their accumulated utterance periods. When a speaker's accumulated utterance period reaches a predetermined threshold, a graphic is displayed to provide immediate visual feedback, encouraging balanced participation and improving meeting productivity through behavioral adjustment.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary processing layer that includes an utterance period calculation unit, accumulation unit, and graphic display unit. This intermediary structure mediates between the raw speech signals and the speakers, translating utterance behavior into visual feedback without requiring direct complex interaction between speakers, thereby managing system complexity through structured intermediate processing.
2Stability of the object's composition
If real-time utterance monitoring is implemented, then speaker balance is improved, but information processing load increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by continuously calculating and accumulating utterance periods in real-time before any intervention is needed. The accumulation unit maintains running totals of utterance periods for each speaker, so when a graphic display threshold is reached, the system is already prepared with the necessary data, reducing the processing load during critical decision moments.
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments the monitoring task by dedicating separate functional units for different aspects: an utterance period calculation unit for measuring speech duration, an accumulation unit for aggregating data across time periods, and a graphic display unit for visual feedback. This segmentation distributes the information processing load across specialized components, improving efficiency and reducing overall system burden.
Data Source
AI summary
An utterance support apparatus includes: a processor configured to execute a program; and a storage device configured to store the program, wherein the processor is configured to execute: calculation processing of calculating an accumulated value of utterance periods of each of a plurality of speakers, and clearing the accumulated value of a speaker having the accumulated value that has reached a predetermined value; and display processing of displaying a first graphic in a display region, which is included in a group of display regions each assigned to each of the plurality of speakers, and which is assigned to the speaker having the accumulated value that has reached the predetermined value.